Comings and Goings
Calypso: A Moment and Movement Concerning Memory, Migration and Displacement

Edric Connor and the Calypso

Gordon Rohlehr (University of the West Indies, St. Augustine)

Abstract

Biography

Gordon Rohlehr is Professor of West Indian Literature at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad, was born in Guyana in 1942. He graduated in 1964 from the University College of the West Indies, Jamaica, with a First Class Honours degree in English Literature, after which he wrote a doctoral dissertation entitled Alienation and Commitment in the Works of Joseph Conrad at Birmingham University, England (1964-1967).

He is author of Pathfinder: Black Awakening in the Arrivants of Edward Kamau Brathwaite (Gordon Rohlehr 1981); Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad (Gordon Rohlehr 1989); My Strangled City and Other Essays (Longman Trinidad 1992); The Shape of That Hurt and Other Essays (Longman Trinidad 1992); A Scuffling of Islands: Essays on Calypso (Lexicon Trinidad Ltd. 2004). He is also co-editor of Voiceprint: An Anthology of Oral and Related Poetry from the Caribbean (Longman 1989).

Between 1968 and 2004, he has written more than 100 essays on West Indian Literature, Oral Poetry, the calypso and popular culture in the Caribbean. He has held over three hundred interviews, prepared and participated in nearly 100 radio and television programmes, and lectured extensively throughout the Caribbean, US, Canada, and the UK. He has been visiting Professor to Harvard (Sept-Dec 1981); the Johns Hopkins University (Sept-Dec 1985); Tulane University (Jan-May 1997); Stephen F. Austin State University (Jan-May 2000); Miami University Writers' Workshop (June-July 1995); York University Toronto (January-Feb 1996) and Dartmouth College, New Hampshire (June-August, 2004).

He has been the recipient of the University of the West Indies' Vice-Chancellor's Award for Excellence in the combined fields of Teaching, Research, Administration and Public Service (1995).